What Can Unions Do to Help?

A union is an organization of workers dedicated to improving wages, hours, and
working conditions within their workplace or industry through collective
bargaining. Unions leverage the collective power of workers to balance out
the power held by bosses and shareholders.

As workers, all of us benefit from past unionizing efforts. Here are some things
unions have fought for and won in the past:

In the sections that follow we'll break down some of the specific ways that
unions can help workers in the game industry.

Layoffs

Most game work is contract or "project"-based, meaning that many game workers
may find themselves out of a job when projects (even very successful ones) are
launched. This is already an unhealthy way to work, but on top of that sometimes
workers are laid off without any warning whatsoever.

If you've never participated in or been represented by a union, you might be
wondering how it can help with something like mass layoffs; cuts are cuts,
right? Well — not quite. One of the most important things a union can achieve
for a workplace or industry is a collective agreement (sometimes called a
collective bargaining agreement, CBA, or collective labour agreement; the term
varies by country). A collective agreement is not the only way of
organizing or making demands — but it's a common and battle-tested one, and most
collective agreements include some form of protection from layoffs by employers:

Some CBAs don't allow layoffs even when the employer claims that it doesn't
have enough money to pay everyone on payroll… Similarly, many CBAs bar
employers from laying off union workers and subcontracting out their jobs.

Many CBAs require employers to "recall" or rehire laid-off workers once the
need for the layoff subsides (for example, when work picks up again).
(Source)

In an industry that often experiences cycles of hirings and layoffs as projects
ramp up to full production, go gold, get cancelled, or change in scope, it's
pretty obvious that even a weaker "right to recall" could still help buy workers
extra stability and peace of mind.

Employers often treat the skilled labour force of game workers in a given region
as a "talent pool" that they can sponge people from when they need them, and
wring people back into when they're no longer needed. But we know that
precarity doesn't have to be a condition of working in the industry.

Crunch

In those days, Miyamoto would come to us at 11 PM, after he finished all of
his board-member work, and say, "It's Mario time." At that point, we'd
start a planning meeting that would run until 2 AM.

Last October, with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 imminent, Rockstar Games
co-founder and boss Dan Houser proudly declared to New York Magazine that
workers were regularly putting in 100-hour work weeks getting the game ready
to ship. Hang on — if you sleep around 8 hours a night there's only 112 hours
in a week! Factor in transit (presuming people weren't sleeping under their
desks, which is not a given), time to eat, etc., and that works out to Rockstar
labourers spending almost every waking moment at their job.

Houser later retracted the statement, saying only the writing team was working
those hours, and only during a period of a few weeks. But that only prompted
backlash from current and former workers: some called out the obvious falsehood
of the retraction and told stories of the immense pressure placed on them (one
former worker noted "during the GTA IV era, it was
like working with a gun to your head, 7 days a week") while others were just
unhappy to have their backbreaking labour downplayed and denied by a studio
head.

Houser and others seem to think that crunch is a sign of dedication and passion
and speaks to the quality of their game. But crunch is abusive. It can go on
for months — even years — and it has very real long-term mental and physical
health impacts for developers. In 2015, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory creative
director Clint Hocking recalled the effects prolonged crunch had on his health
during development of that game a decade prior:

[My friend] had spent a week living in my house. I had curtailed my work week
down from 70-80 hours to a normal 40 in order to spend time with him. We had
eaten great meals, gone to great bars, seen movies, played games, and talked
about our careers and the industry and our pasts and our futures, and all of
it was simply fucking gone. I could not remember any of it.

To be clear — I do not mean I didn't remember what we did or what we talked
about. I mean that I literally had no memory of the events. To me it was like
it never happened. It was like he never visited. There was just an empty space
in my brain that had been overwritten by the stress and anxiety of Splinter
Cell. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory gave me brain damage.
(Source)

Maybe Hocking got off easy. In 2016, a game developer at South Korean company
Netmarble was
acknowledged
to have "died from a work-related cause" after putting in months of intense
overtime.

Many in the game industry try to paint crunch as unavoidable, but we believe it
is ultimately a story of poor planning and unreachable deadlines — and more
importantly, of putting profits above the human beings whose labour makes
games. Concretely, unions can discourage crunch by ensuring that employees
are paid for overtime, by increasing overtime rates, and by putting a
hard limit on how many hours of overtime can be required in a given day or
week. This helps those already in the industry, but it also makes it more
likely that employers will hire more people instead of cheating prospective
workers out of a job by forcing too much work on existing employees.

When in Bioware they said they had a three-month crunch, we laughed. During
the Witcher 3, a lot of people crunched for over a year — some of them for
three years.

Witcher 3 development kept getting worse by the month. The morale got very low
and everyone ended up complaining during crunch supper. Some of us were still
looking forward to being moved to Cyberpunk and having a fresh start with a
"new" project. When we finally started switching to Cyberpunk… things got even
wilder, even more chaotic. At that time, almost everybody in my team wanted to
leave.

Harassment

Harassment has been a well-known problem in the game industry for years now, but
so far bosses have done little to actually address the issue apart from
releasing boilerplate statements about how the company "condemns harassment."
When harassment happens inside the workplace, workers often have nowhere to
turn. HR departments are supposed to be the first port of call, but too often
they're more concerned with protecting the company's public image than they are
with protecting the employees.

Unions can help by providing workers with a place they can go to make sure their
concerns are heard, and unlike HR, they are directly answerable to the workers
they represent. While an individual worker could be ignored or even fired for
talking about their experiences with harassment (especially if the harasser is
in a position of power within the company), they are much more likely to be
taken seriously when they have the backing of other employees. Unions can
also push for systemic changes, such as the introduction of anti-harassment
policies or training programs, that help prevent harassment from happening in
the first place.

Harassment is more likely to happen in situations where employers or managers
have unilateral power to make or break an employee's career, and therefore
anything that tips the balance of power in favour of employees also helps
reduce harassment. Since harassment is often tied to discrimination and a lack
of diversity in the workplace, measures that increase diversity such as fairer
hiring practices, wage equity, or more comprehensive health benefits, can also
be a way to curb harassment.

Marginalized workers, who are more likely to be the targets of harassment, are
already organizing in many workplaces through whisper networks and informal
support groups. These efforts often form the foundations for wider organizing
campaigns, and help build solidarity, trust, and mutual respect between workers.
While businesses push workers to compete with one another for jobs or raises,
creating a hostile and toxic work culture, the process of unionizing encourages
workers to come together to solve their problems collectively. Solidarity is
key to building a successful union campaign, and once workers realize this,
they are more likely to change views and behaviours that ultimately just serve
to divide and disempower us.

Creative Control

You might believe your employers' motivation is to create great games, and in
some cases that may be true. But at the end of the day they're here to make
money, and that has a direct influence on creative decisions. Executives don't
necessarily care that the development team is aiming to make, say, a great
single-player game, but they do care about how Battle Royale games are
outselling everything else right now and how microtransactions are a major
driver of revenue for large publishers. So the order comes from above to add
those things to the project, even if they are creatively incompatible.

The pursuit of profit is what drives bosses to prioritize one project over
another, to think about ad placement, to change design based on market research,
and make other kinds of creative compromises. This is also what leads companies
to cancel more experimental projects in favour of the "safe bet," or force
workers to meet unrealistic deadlines in order to release before the holiday
season.

If you work in the industry, how often have you had to implement or cut
features following a decision by an executive, which ended up being
detrimental to the quality of the game? Don't you wish you'd had the power to
negotiate in that kind of situation? Don't you wish you'd at least been asked
for your input, instead of having to work silently in a direction only to have
to start again from scratch a month later because higher-ups decided a new trend
needed to be worked into the project somehow?

Workers in the game industry are passionate about what they do — that's why
companies get away with exploiting them! — so it is particularly hurtful when
they're forced to create things that they don't believe in. Whether workers
ultimately agree with management's decisions or not, at least in a unionized
workplace, their opinion gets to be voiced and heard.

A strong unionized workforce or a worker co-op doesn't just help improve
conditions in the workplace! It also allows the people who actually make the
games to exercise more creative control and put their efforts towards something
they believe in.

Crediting Issues

In games, credits are one of the most important ways your efforts as a worker
get noticed. If you're new to the games industry, you might believe that getting
credited for your work on a game is a straightforward process. But that's not
always the case. Rockstar, for example, is known for holding credits over
workers' heads as a reward for finishing work on a game. As journalist Richard
Moss wrote last
year:

For studios, crediting can be a tool for leverage … [Rockstar] has long
maintained a policy of not crediting people who worked on a game unless they
were present when it shipped, to encourage the team "to get to the finish
line."

This form of "encouragement" is not just manipulative, it hurts workers' ability
to find future employment.

Workers in other industries (such as film) have fought for and
won
the right to proper crediting through unions. Unions can do the same for the
games industry.

Better Pay

Here's an easy one: unionized workers have higher wages on average than
workers who are not unionized — often between 15 to 25% more. With the
leverage of an organized workforce, collective bargaining is a very effective
way to make sure you're paid what you're worth. But unions also benefit
workers who are not unionized by raising the bar for everyone. For example, a
high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but who works in an
industry that's 25% unionized overall can still expect to be paid
more than similar
workers in less unionized industries.

Unions can also help reduce inequality. While all workers benefit from
having unions, those who benefit the most are typically the people who are the
most disempowered or in the most precarious positions. On top of improving
general working conditions for these folks, it also turns out solidarity is a
great way to cut down the gendered pay
gap.